Spahn: “There will not be any occasional chat control with us”

The debate about chat control comes shortly before the decisive EU council meeting. On Tuesday afternoon, Union faction leader Jens Spahn (CDU) rejected the controversial measure. “We at the CDU/CSU parliamentary group are against the occasional control of chats,” said Spahn in the afternoon in front of journalists in Berlin. As Heise found online from parliamentary group circles, the chat control should not initially come to the council.

“It would be like opening all the letters as a precaution and see if there is something forbidden in it,” said Spahn. “It doesn’t work, it won’t exist with us.” At the same time, however, it was clear that child abuse must be able to be combated, the parliamentary group leader emphasized, and praised the EU initiative. A regulation must effectively protect children “without endangering the security and confidentiality of individual communication”.

Operation or not

The word is the word “without occasional”. The Union thus rejects general mass surveillance. However, the technology would also have to be massively weakened for an occurrence -related monitoring of encrypted chats in order to enable third parties to access the content. This would broke the end-to-end encryption between the clients.

The renewed advance for chat control is conducted by the Danish Presidency under the banner of combating child abuse. The EU Parliament, on the other hand, is decided to drastically restrict the fundamental right to communication protected from government access. The EU Council of the member states should originally vote on it in the coming week.

So far, a minority with Germany, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands had prevented a decision in the council. If one of the four falls over, the blocking minority would be gone.

In the Federal Government, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) has so far been open to the advance of the Danes. The SPD continues to reject the chat control and welcomed Spahn’s statements. It is good that the Union follows the concerns, said SPD parliamentary group vice Sonja Eichwede. “The protection of children is central, but suspected surveillance of private communication is the wrong way.”

Group has a need for speech

Already in the course of the day it was apparent that there is apparently still a need for speech. In principle, Dobrindt’s Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice of Stefanie Hubig (SPD) had in principle agreed on a voting position. But then the Federal Government found that the Bundestag factions supporting them also have their own perspectives.

So there was a sharp criticism that the new coalition has so far not been able to discuss the questions related to the planned regulation. Now that the regulation has been discussed for three years, there is no reason to push through German positioning without thorough participation with the members of the Bundestag within a few hours, according to parliamentary group circles.

Several organizations around D64 and CCC are calling for the federal government in one Eil petition “Stop chat control!” on to clearly reject the chat control in the EU Council. The petition collected over 190,000 signatures within a day.